Paint flecks on wrists
Thermal fabric cloyed on hips
Close to your skin
These inanimate things
That moved with you
Alive, pulsing
Across sinews
Your Jerusalem cross
Rising, and falling
On your clean, milk chest
I muse
'You cannot be late, or dimiss them'
With penetrating silence
These things to me now
On the bodies of others
More than you were
That's left of you to me
Intimately betrayed
On the flesh of strangers
